Lasagna

I get paid bi-weekly, so last Sunday night I was investigating my refrigerator and cabinets in an effort to figure out what I could eat for the next few days until I got paid (I am terrible with money). I ended up making meat sauce in my crock pot out of a few crumbled burger patties and jars of store-bought sauce. I filled 2 of the empty jars with meat sauce and stuck them in the freezer with plans to make lasagna over the weekend. Because of the way life works, lasagna night ended up being postponed until tonight.

I bought a box of Barilla no-boil lasagna noodles and mostly followed the directions on the back. In addition to the 2 jars of "home made" meat sauce, I used a 15 ox can of store brand tomato sauce for the top and bottom of the lasagna and added some crumbled bacon and chopped vegetables to the layers.

This is, without a doubt, the most delicious lasagna I've ever had in my entire life. The vegetables I used were 1 green bell pepper, 1 red bell pepper, 2 tomatoes (bought on the vine), and 2 cloves of elephant garlic. The peppers stayed relatively crisp instead of getting mushy, and the crumbled bacon really enhanced the flavor of the ground beef in the sauce.

I made an entire tray of this which, according to the Barilla box, will serve 12 people. We'll see about that.

Recovering from the Holi-daze

I'm finally getting back into the swing of things, now that the holidays are over and done with and everyone's gone back home. Life's been busy - I'm taking a winter intercession course (only 1 week left) and I've had a couple of projects tying up my time at work. The past couple of weeks all I;ve wanted to do when I got home from work was take a nap or read.

I moved my computer into my living room about a month and a half ago so that I could put wallpaper on my desk as a shelf-liner. I still have one shelf left and then I can stop using my desk for whatever I'm holding when I come through the door and start using it for my computer again. On the plus side, I did manage to put up some pretty awesome wall stickers - doesn't that look neat?

I have a few unfinished decorating projects around here and it's time for me to just get them over with. I'll be doing a major cleaning job this week so that I can finish some stuff up the weekend, like painting frames, touching up my dressers, and possibly even hemming my curtains. Well, maybe not that last part.

Also! Christmas brought me the gift of...a crock pot! I've used it twice now - once for chicken, and once to make meat sauce - and it's amazing. I love coming home and having dinner ready and waiting.

Also! This will most likely be the last time that you're subjected to shoddy camera-phone photography on this blog. My computer had not wanted to cooperate with my camera for a while, but they're finally willing to play nice again, so...you can look forward to that.

This for me to get some sleep - I work tomorrow morning (yes, even though it's a Sunday). I hope you're all doing well!

A Great and Terrible Beauty

It's been a while since I last posted. I haven't done much cooking lately because of the holidays, although my kitchen now has a food processor, a blender, and a crock pot, so...look forward to new food posts soon. The holidays kept me pretty busy - my cousins were here from Louisiana with their children and two of my best friends were in town, so I was keeping busy. Then I came down with some kind of virus that left me feeling awful for a few days...which meant that I did a lot of reading.

On Christmas, my sisters Colleen and Maggie gave me the Gemma Doyle trilogy by Libba Bray. I couldn't put these books down! The series takes place in Victorian England and revolves around a 16-year-old girl named Gemma Doyle who finds out that she has special powers. I loved the characters, and Libba Bray wrote some fantastic dialogue throughout the three books as well.

According to Wikipedia, the first book was going to be turned into a movie but the production company decided against it. I'm crossing my fingers that someone else will pick up the project, because I'd love to see this on screen!